Loaded Labor Rate Formulas

Loaded Labor Rates allow you to adjust the rate of a Labor Resource based on a specific condition. Examples of this for a given Labor Resource are: one Operation's labor costs 1.5x as much as labor on other Operations, or labor cost changes based on the value of a Custom Input called Difficulty which you have added to your account as a Job-level Custom Input.

As with Labor Resources in general, these amounts relate to the Cost of Labor recorded on a Job and not the Price. Labor Resources and any applied Loaded Labor Rates affect the Cost for more accurate Job Costing and profitability on reports.Conversely, the Price of Labor is set on the Unit Price of an Item in category: Labor, which affects the Billable amount. 

In this article: 

Using Loaded Labor Rates

Formula Suggestions & Examples

Using Loaded Labor Rates

Loaded labor rates use formulas to allow for tracking an employee's true pay rate and managing job cost reporting with a true loaded rate. 

1. Navigate to: Admin > Loaded Labor Rate Formulas

2. Create a new formula by selecting New Loaded Labor Rate Formula

3. Complete the formula as desired; several suggestions and examples are described below.

Once entered, Loaded Labor Rate Formulas can be applied to a labor resource. To do this:

1. Navigate to: Admin > Loaded Labor Rate Formulas

2. Edit a Labor Resource and set the Labor Rate to the Loaded Rate Formula you would like to use.

Suggestions & Examples of Formulas

Formula #1- A Sample Multiplier

For our first example we will create a formula that applies a simple multiplier. Let's say that after examining your numbers you have determined that you need to "load" your labor by 50% to account for other direct expenses such as payroll taxes, health insurance, workers comp, etc in order to have accurate job costing. The first step would be creating a new formula:

While building your formula we have provided a list of all available variables that can be used. The list in your system may be longer than in this example because your operation, client, and job custom inputs are all available as inputs to the formula. For this example all we need to do is take the labor resource rate and apply a 50% markup. Our final formula is labor_resource_rate * 1.5.

Once the formula is created it can be attached to any labor resource rate by following the steps in the first video in this post. Once that is done the labor costs for that labor resource will be boosted by 50% in all of your job costing reports. 

Formula #2- Using Custom Inputs

Let's make things a little bit more interesting. Let's say in your business after examining your numbers you have determined that your load factor for your Tree operation is 50%, Maintenance is 35%, and PHC is 75%. To facilitate that you can add a custom input to your operation, and then bring that custom input into your formula. This way instead of hard-coding a 50% increase, your labor costs will be updated dynamically based on the operation of the job your team logs time against. 

To create this formula you can utilize operation custom inputs like this:

To make this easy all available variables are provided in the list, and you can click on any of them to have them added to the formula automatically. Now the formula can be associated with any labor rate, and as long as those values are filled in on the operation you're good to go!

Additional Formula Examples

*Please note: Formulas which call text are case sensitive (i.e. if Operation is entered in SingleOps as PHC, then a formula calling this Operation should read "PHC" and not "phc")